UK senior air controllers on foreign jolly when Heathrow crashed

See Computer glitch grounded planes.

The staffers - not civil servants now, but part of a public/private enterprise scheme - had flown to Taipei the week before as part of an Eva (Evergreen) safety programme the airline offers every two years.

Two out of the four control towers at Heathrow and Terminal Four and one of the four inveighed heavily about Computer Weekly and its tabloid coverage of the incident, which led to delays on aeroplanes flying into the UK, with subsequent delays and frustration, as we reported last week.

Bugs in the IBM systems at West Drayton were responsible for the shutting down of planes coming into the UK, and not at Swanwick, we understand.

A well known bug in software at West Drayton on the IBM machines only manifests itself after a few hours normally, but last week the bug started, forcing the safety conscious controllers to shut down the entire system.

The IBM machines control all aspects of air traffic control, and many software packages run on top of it, so it was a situation where everything Big Blue had to have the equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DELETE administered.

NATS is installing a new system which will have all parts separate, staff from NATS on flight Eva BR68 told the INQ. Its internal network is not open to the world.

One NATS staffer asked why Computer Weekly majored on this type of thing week after week, despite the fact that Heathrow and the UK have one of the best records on safety in the world, training people from everywhere else.

There's no answer to that question, we told the staffer.

When the doors opened on arrival at Heathrow, the NATS staffers were greeted by ground staff who had them whisked away to their local offices, where, no doubt, the inquest is still proceeding.

As we arrived on time, we noticed that a new control tower was being assembled on the tarmac near Terminal Five - that will be the centre of new aircraft traffic control. The huge structure will be dragged across a runway on multi-wheeled vehicles and the worry is that when that happens in a few weeks time, all activities at Heathrow will stop.

The premier airport in the world is only 30 minutes from INQ Central, so in theory we can fly anywhere in the world at short notice. Although long hauls take a little while longer. We can report that we got routed straight in and arrived one minute early. We don't believe in coincidences at the INQ. µ